


Stay With Me

by tessafreakingvirtue



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Demonic Possession, Demons, Disturbing Themes, F/M, Murder, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2021-01-02 19:10:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21166520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tessafreakingvirtue/pseuds/tessafreakingvirtue
Summary: That night, she saw the woman in her dreams again. She lounged beside her on the dark sand, her sharp nails tracing Tessa’s pale skin.Tessa raised a trembling hand, used her finger to write the words in the sand: You’re a demon.





	Stay With Me

**Author's Note:**

> This is... very different from anything else I've ever written. It's disturbing. I love horror and I've wanted to write a horror-themed fic for a long, long time but I might have overdone it. This is my Halloween contribution. And I think after this I'm super ready to get back to Pretend That You Love Me. 
> 
> Trigger warnings for murder, blood, demons, possession. I'm telling you up front... this doesn't have a happy ending. This fic is based on the only book that has ever terrified me to the point of nightmares, Come Closer by Sara Gran. This fic is also inspired by an edit on Instagram by dailytvirtue. If you want to see the edit, I'll post it in my story on Instagram @ tessafreakingvirtue. 
> 
> Proceed with caution.

It started with the knocks. They were quiet at first; barely noticeable. She first heard them one night when she was tucked into a chair in the corner of the living room. A Jane Austen novel lie open on her lap, her green eyes scanning the pages, a contented smile curling the corners of her lips. She was happy then, really, truly happy for what had felt like the first time in forever. 

When the knocks sounded, she glanced up toward the door first, and then at Scott. He was watching a hockey game, the drone of the crowd distracting him. It wasn’t until he felt her eyes on him that he turned to look at her. 

“What?” 

He was so soft, his voice so calm and cool. 

“Did you hear that?” She asked. Scott furrowed his eyebrows, but never decreased the volume of the television. 

“Hear what?” 

“The knocks,” she responded, sitting up a little straighter now in her chair, “there were three of them.” 

_Knock. Knock. Knock._

Scott glanced toward the door before looking back to her. 

“I didn’t hear any knocks, T.” 

Tessa watched him, waited for the inevitable smirk that would curl his lips when he revealed that he was teasing. The smirk, however, didn’t come, and Tessa pushed herself to her feet, setting aside the novel and plush white blanket she’d spread over her. 

She moved through the room and to the foyer, peering through the glass of the front door and into the enveloping darkness. 

“There’s no one outside,” she murmured after a moment. She looked into the abyss of blackness beyond the front door, allowed her eyes to follow the movement of the naked trees as the wind caused them to sway. 

“Of course there’s no one outside,” Scott was behind her suddenly, his warm hand resting on her shoulder. “And there wasn’t any knocking. It’s probably just the trees brushing against the side of the house. We can have someone come out tomorrow to trim them, eh?” 

The feel of his hand heavy upon her shoulder both alarmed and comforted her at the same time, and she simultaneously wanted to shrug it off and beg him to hold her closer. 

“Yeah,” she said quietly, her eyes continuing to peer into the darkness. “Okay.” 

She allowed him to lead her away from the window and back into the living room, but even after she’d settled back in her overstuffed chair and pulled the blanket over her once more, she couldn’t quite dispel the chill that had slipped over her. 

She heard the knocks once more two days later as she sat in her office. Scott was out, coaching at the rink, and she’d dedicated herself to completing an online module for her astrophysics class. 

A phrase from her online reading caught her eye, stuck in her brain like a fly to sticky tape: _Thus, astrophysics tells us that, while we are not all stars, we are all stardust._

She contemplated those words, remembered the way she and Scott had stared up at the inky black sky spotted with diamonds on the drives home from competitions when they’d been children. Her head on his shoulder, or more often, both of their heads on the Marvin the Martian pillow that always made the trip with them. She’d loved the quiet solitude of those rides; no unnecessary conversation, no talk of the next competition. 

Her reverie was interrupted when she heard them once more. 

_Knock. Knock. Knock._

They were louder this time; they sounded closer. It was almost as if they were coming from inside the walls just above her head. She cried out, the vase on the table rattling with each sharp rap. She pushed herself backward in her office chair, her feet scurrying across the floor and toward the open doorway. Her thin fingers gripped the arms of the chair until the tips of them were white with pressure. 

Just as she had checked the front door two days ago, Tessa moved to the window that overlooked the front of her home, eyes cast downward to search the walkway for a visitor. It was overcast outside; the sky was an ugly grey and dead leaves swept up the walk as if they had a life of their own. Still, there was no one on her property, no one even passing her home. 

Tessa saved her progress, closed her laptop, and went downstairs to wait for Scott to come home. 

She mentioned it to him at dinner that night over a meal of Bangkok Pad Thai. His fingers clumsily worked the chopsticks and she had the sudden, inexplicable urge to knock them from his hand, maybe even jab one into his eye. Her eyes focused on the wooden sticks, then moved to the way they balanced precariously in his digits. At the sight of a noodle disappearing between his lips with a slurp, she blinked, broke the trance, met his eyes. 

“You heard them again?” He asked, chewing. She nodded, using her own chopsticks to pick at her meal. “Were you in the living room?” 

“No,” she shook her head, used her hand to scratch at the back of her neck. “In my office. They were louder, like shaking-the-walls louder.” 

Scott swallowed, frowned. 

“Maybe the house was settling?” He suggested dumbly. 

She blinked at him. 

“The house wasn’t settling like that,” she insisted, “houses don’t settle in booms. They settle with creaks. It was very clear, Scott. Three knocks.” She replicated the sound against the wooden dining table. “Just like that.” 

“Well I wouldn’t worry about it, babe,” he shrugged, his fingers already working the chopsticks once more, her words already half-forgotten. “Maybe it’s just a mouse or something. We can call an exterminator.” 

Tessa glared at him, but his attention was already focused on his meal once more. 

“It’s not a mouse,” she whispered, but he’d already started to talk about his own day, about the pair of skaters who had given him the most trouble on the ice that afternoon. 

She struggled to pay attention to him, tried to empathize with his plight, tried to put it all into perspective for herself. Still, her mind floated back to this afternoon, to the article she’d been reading before she’d been interrupted. _We are all stardust._

It suddenly seemed so trivial, their careers as athletes and then performers. How could any of it matter, when life really just consisted of hydrogen and helium, nitrogen and oxygen. Any action or lack of action didn’t matter once that star got to the end of its life; each person, no matter how prominent during their existence, was just a remnant of a massive explosion from a distant galaxy. 

Maybe those were the knocks she’d been hearing, she mused as she brought a piece of shrimp to her lips. Maybe they were just stars exploding.

The first dream came a week later. She hadn’t heard the knocks for three days, had damn near forgotten about them until the sound had ushered in the nocturnal vision. There was a beach, not unlike the one where their family’s cottage was located. There was a shore, there was the water bubbling up to the sand. It should have been safe, familiar. But it wasn’t. 

The waves ran red, though Tessa couldn’t be sure if they were thick with blood or something else. There were parts of the world in which algae tainted the water at certain times of the year, turning it crimson. She tried to focus on the liquid; she thought perhaps she could get close enough to the sea to investigate, when a dark shape in the distance caught her eye. 

It was a human, that much she could make out. It appeared to be a woman, trudging along the shore, the dark red water pooling around her ankles and calves. She was too far away to determine if the water stained her skin with its unnatural hue. She could see the curve of her body, the shape of her hips. She was nude. 

She was speaking, but it would have been impossible to hear her over the crashing waves and distance. Still, Tessa could swear she heard her silky voice reverberating in her mind. 

“Come to me.” 

Tessa awoke with a start, blinking into the darkness. Beside her, Scott snored softly. She glanced at the clock. It was just past three o’clock in the morning. 

She was sweating, she realized, but there was a distinct chill in the room. Maybe the heat had switched off, though it had never done that before. The droplets of perspiration began to dry quickly, cooling her skin and causing her to pull the blankets up around her. 

She thought about waking Scott, considered for a moment the idea of him sliding his arms around her, whispering reassurance into her ear. Maybe it would turn into one of the late-night-early-morning love-making sessions they’d always been so fond of. It would be nice, she thought, feeling his weight on top of her, feeling him part her as he slid inside. 

And in the same instance, a matter of seconds later, she hated him. The thought of him penetrating her made her feel disgusted and angry. A vision of herself holding a pillow over his face struck her suddenly, and even lying next to him suddenly made her feel sick. She pushed herself out of bed and into the washroom, turning on the cold water and cupping her hands beneath it. She splashed it the cool liquid onto her face, watched herself in the mirror as the water dripped from her skin. 

From the corner of her eye, she saw movement in the darkened bedroom. She assumed it was Scott, prepared herself for his inevitable embrace. But a moment passed, and then two, and when she stepped back into the bedroom, Scott was where she’d left him. Still asleep. Still snoring. 

The dream had unsettled her and yet, paradoxically, intrigued her. She wanted to see the woman again. She needed to know who she was, wanted to re-examine that pull she’d felt to move closer. 

She didn’t need to wait long. The dream came again the following night. 

Each night for two weeks, she saw the beach. It was the same shore, the same red water. The sky was dark purple, though she hadn’t noticed that the first time. Each night, the scene remained the same. Except for one thing. The woman. 

She got closer, night by night. It was a nearly imperceptible change at first, like watching someone age. The transformation doesn’t happen all at once, not right in front of you. It takes place little by little, over days, months, years. It occurred the same way with stars, she’d learned from her class; that same transformation took place over multiple lifetimes. Everything was the same until it wasn’t. 

The woman always walked slowly, seemingly unhurried by the rising red sea and the plum sky. And though she never seemed to make progress in her trek, each night she was just a bit nearer. At first, Tessa had wondered if the woman was herself, if she would continue to watch this frightening yet completely alluring stranger get closer until she began to recognize her own features. 

But as the nights went on, as the dreams continued, Tessa began to become aware of her own presence. She could feel the warmth of her toes buried in the dark sand, could see her legs extending from the trunk of her body. 

Still, each night, she uttered the same three words just before Tessa woke. 

“Come to me.” 

At first, the words had felt like an invitation. She’d been intrigued, curious. As the nights wore on, however, she began to dread hearing them. It began to sound less like an invitation and more like a demand. Eventually, she found herself trying to move away from the approaching figure only to find her feet stuck in the sand. 

Scott was preparing to leave town for a competition, had asked her if she’d wanted to accompany him. She’d considered it, she had been making more of an effort to enjoy their relationship again. Aside from the dreams, things felt like they were back to normal. They were flirting, making love, laughing. There were significantly fewer instances where she felt inexplicably repulsed by him and even fewer in which she felt an overwhelming desire to just… hurt him. Slam his head against the wall. Shove her pen through his ear. These desires, these visions came to her without warning and often left her breathless and panicking, pressing herself against a wall or locked into the bathroom to get away from him.  
Scott had noticed these instances of course, but he had never asked. With the weight of school, her partnerships, and the soul-searching she’d been doing, there was a reasonable explanation for her anxiety. He spent two weeks begging her to come with him to Montreal for the competition, but by the third, he had stopped asking. 

When he left, Tessa wasn’t sure he would come back.

As soon as he was gone, things began to change. The knocks returned in full force, sometimes so loud and often that she felt as if she were going insane. They seemed to follow her from room to room as if they were taunting her. Things began to turn up in odd places; a knife that had been in the butcher’s block on the counter appeared at the end of her bed.

She received an email from the professor of her astrophysics class, Dr. Mullins. He was incensed at the contents of her latest homework submission. The email was so full of rage that it brought tears to her eyes and she immediately logged onto her computer to recheck her work; she’d submitted a document on nebulae, what theory could have possibly enraged him so much? But when she pulled up the submission, gone were the words she’d typed, the four pages that had been so carefully crafted. Instead, one sentence repeated over and over: _Dr. Mullins is a cock-sucker. Dr. Mullins is a cock-sucker. Dr. Mullins is a cock-sucker._

Humiliated, she contacted him right away, apologized profusely for the misunderstanding. She didn’t know what had happened, couldn’t possibly have submitted that document because she’d never written (or said) such a thing in her life. It took a number of emails and two desperate phone calls to convince him that she would never do such a thing, that someone had to have hacked her account and uploaded the vulgarity in place of her hard work. 

He’d accepted the new document and her apology, but it was the first time Tessa had been truly, and terribly, frightened. 

She filled her time with work, school, her family. They could tell something was different; it wasn’t hard to see the dark bags under her eyes or the weight she’d lost. When they asked, she told them the truth: she wasn’t sleeping well, bad dreams. Jordan recommended chamomile tea. Her mother recommended a hot bath just before bed. An online community she found suggested sleeping pills. Tessa chose to take the latter route. 

The dreams didn’t go away, and in fact seemed to become longer. The woman’s features started to come into view, and Tessa could see that her dark hair was matted in filthy clumps. Aside from her hair, the woman was beautiful with wide, dark eyes and red lips that curved into a seductive smile. Once the woman was close enough for Tessa to see her features, the dialogue changed. It was no longer the same invitation/demand over and over. 

“Come to me,” she invited once more, but then, in her sultry voice, “will you let me stay with you?”

Her face was so beautiful, her smile so wide. She wanted this woman to like her. She wanted a friend. And so, Tessa used her index finger to write the word in the dark sand: _YES._

The woman’s smile grew. Her hand reached out, slender fingers slipping into hers. 

“You’re mine.” 

Tessa woke with a smile on her face.

Nothing happened for a few weeks. The knocks had subsided, there had been no more incidences of items displaced around her home. Scott ended up returning, and it was nice. It was better. She had him during the day and the woman, Manea, whose name she had seen written in the sand, at night. She never spoke, didn’t need to, because there was no more left to say. Tessa had come to her, as she’d asked. Each night, she dreamed again of Manea. There was no more fear. 

She couldn’t seem to explain the dreams to Scott, so she turned once more to the internet. She used a few simple search terms before typing in the woman’s name. When her search queries were returned, there was a moment where she couldn’t find her breath. She checked the spelling once more, clicked the link, waited. 

_Mania (or Manea) was a goddess of the dead. In Roman and Etruscan mythology, Manea is the Goddess of Spirits and Chaos. In Greek Mythology, she is the Goddess of insanity and madness._

Tessa’s fingers trembled on the keyboard of her laptop, she forced a laugh from the back of her throat, but it was dry, humorless. She could feel her heart racing in her chest, could think of nothing but the woman’s wide, enchanting smile. 

That night, she saw the woman in her dreams again. She lounged beside her on the dark sand, her sharp nails tracing Tessa’s pale skin. 

Tessa raised a trembling hand, used her finger to write the words in the sand: _You’re a demon._

The woman had smiled, exposing sharp teeth that glistened even in the strange light from above. 

“I’m your friend,” she had laughed, the sound so grating that Tessa raised her hands to cover her ears. “And I’m the only one you have left.” 

Scott left a few days later, supposedly for another competition, though she couldn’t be sure. She’d started to care less and less. The thoughts of harming him had returned; the sudden desire to cut the brake lines of his car or to slice his veins as he slept. She fought them as much as she could. She stopped turning in her assignments for school. She received an email that there was a serious possibility she would fail the semester. 

Scott didn’t come home. 

She failed. 

And through it all, Manea came to visit her in her dreams. 

One night, on the beach in her dreams, Tessa reached out and physically removed the woman’s hand from her wrist. 

_Leave me alone_, she’d written in the sand, and then, with a thrumming heart, _you’ve ruined my life._

Manea’s laugh echoed through the bizarre world, booming like the knocks that had started everything. 

“You’re mine,” she repeated, “You said so.” 

_Not anymore_, Tessa wrote. _You can’t have me._

There was a flash in the purple sky, the red sea suddenly roaring. Manea’s smile disappeared, her eyes turned darker. 

“I always get what I want,” Manea grinned, though the beauty in her face had disappeared. “You’ll see.” 

For the first time in months, she didn’t dream of Manea the next night. 

It wasn’t unusual when she called Scott the following week. It wasn’t unusual that he agreed to come over, that he said he wanted to work things out with her. 

It wasn’t unusual that they made love in the bed they’d shared for so long, nor that he fell asleep beside her afterward. 

Tessa didn’t even realize that she’d woken in the middle of the night until she was standing beside the bed, her fingers clutching the object so tightly that her hand shook with the force of it. She didn’t know what she’d done until the knife had punctured Scott’s throat, until she felt the first warm spurt of blood on her face and her hands. She didn’t know how she found the power to withdraw it and stab it into his chest, once, twice, so many times that she lost count. 

She didn’t even realize he’d taken his last breath until the blood stopped flowing and her naked body was sprayed with the red liquid, until it pooled on the floor at her feet just as the red sea had done. 

She collapsed shortly after, next to his lifeless body. 

Manea came to her in the darkness, the wicked smile spreading across her face, her body marked with the same blood spatter patterns. 

“I told you I always get what I want,” she sneered, the fire in her black eyes flickering, “I wanted you. And now you're with me, always.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not anywhere near as smart as Tessa, so I used a lot of Wikipedia and National Geographic articles to talk me through the whole astrophysics thing. Oh, and also the demons.


End file.
